52 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019
invariably happened, Dennis had other
things he wanted to discuss. A friend had
mailed him a pair of new work boots, but
he wasn’t allowed to keep them, he said,
because they were light brown with a
black leather strip on top; prisoners weren’t
allowed to have shoes of more than one
color. Before the visit, Dennis had told
Button on the phone, “Don’t forget the
boots”—and Button had not forgotten
to pick them up at the front desk on her
way out of the prison. He had said that
she could wear them or give them away;
in the parking lot after leaving the prison,
she had tried them on and found that
they fit. But she decided, “I’m going to
hold them until he gets out.”
Lee usually took charge at their vis-
its, and this time she wanted to try a
new strategy. Instead of talking about
“if ” he got parole, she insisted that they
say “when.” Dennis was resistant. “The
guys in here say ‘when,’ ‘when,’ ‘when,’”
he said, “but I’m not going to do that,
because, you know, the parole board could
hit me however many times they want.
You just don’t know.” Lee recalled, “I
was, like, ‘Listen, Lloyd, I hear that. But
we have to say “when.” I’m going to say
“when,” and I need you to say “when,”
because if you don’t imagine it, it’s not
going to happen.’” Dennis played along.
When the volunteers asked him what
he wanted to do first after being released,
he answered, “I want to go fishing.”
There was not a Parole Prep hand-
out about the benefits of encouraging
an incarcerated person to visualize his
own freedom, but Lee thought that it
might help Dennis work harder to pre-
pare for the hearing. It would be easy
for them to update his parole packet,
but in the next five months, she said,
“he has a lot of mental and emotional
work to do.” They had assigned him the
task of writing an apology letter—“That’s
his homework,” Lee said—which they
planned to include in his packet.
That spring, Lee was accepted into
M.I.T.’s graduate program in urban plan-
ning. She quit her job in June and went
to stay with her parents, outside Phila-
delphia. There, she worked on Dennis’s
parole packet, reading and rereading his
attempts at an apology letter. To her, they
seemed slightly flat; she thought he still
sounded like too much of a passive par-
ticipant in his own crime. On July 8th,
she borrowed her mother’s car and drove
to Auburn. She recalled that, as soon as
Dennis sat down in the visiting room,
she said, “We have a lot to do today. I
have to leave by one-thirty. So we have
two hours, and we’re going to talk about
the crime. It might be difficult, but that’s
just what we’re going to do.”
In the past, when the volunteers had
asked Dennis about his crime, he had
told them that Patrolman Denton had
approached him in a way that made him
feel threatened. Sometimes he charac-
terized his crime as an act of self-defense.
At times, Lee thought that maybe even
Dennis himself did not know why he
had done it. His court file had been de-
stroyed in a warehouse fire, and although
the volunteers had read one or two news
stories about the crime, they did not
have a full understanding of what had
occurred on July 24, 1971. If they had
read his court file, they would have
learned that witnesses had described a
spontaneous, unprovoked attack.
In the visiting room at Auburn, Lee
repeatedly grilled Dennis about that
night, and made it clear that some of
his answers were unsatisfactory. “You’re
describing this as something that hap-
pened to you, and it’s not,” she said. “It’s
something that you did.” She had heard
him talk critically about the rapists he
was imprisoned with, and she made it
clear that she didn’t buy into the idea
that someone who has committed rape
is somehow a worse person than some-
one who has committed murder. “To a
lot of people, what you have done is theworst thing that anyone could possibly
do,” she said. Her words seemed to stun
him; he said nothing and looked away.
The way Lee saw it, she was doing
work that somebody else at the prison
should have done decades earlier. “He
should have been doing this work in
therapy for his whole life with a social
worker or psychologist or anyone, any
qualified professional, which I am not—
I’m definitely not,” she told me. “Thatwould have made so much of a differ-
ence, because now the story that he tells
himself has been cemented for all this
time. And, for me, trying to push back
on that now is really challenging.”
It seemed that the coping strategies
Dennis had adopted were working
against him. “The only way that he’s
survived for this long—completely alone,
completely isolated from his entire sup-
port network—is by totally closing off
emotionally and relying on only him-
self,” Lee said. “He’s never been asked
to do anything remotely emotional.”
But, she said of the parole board, “what
they’re asking for is something genuine
and emotional.”
That night, Dennis called Button
and told her about the visit. Button sent
a text to Lee: “He called me and sounded
really appreciative and said you helped
him think in a new way. He also said,
‘You didn’t tell me you were sending in
a pit bull.’”B
y the late summer of 2019, Lee had
moved to Cambridge to start classes
at M.I.T., and White was about to begin
his second year of graduate school in
Amherst. Dennis appeared before the
parole board for the thirteenth time on
August 27th. Two days later, Button and
her boyfriend rode their bikes to a restau-
rant in Crown Heights, and when they
were locking them up she heard her cell
phone vibrate inside her backpack. She
pulled it out and read a message from
Lee, who had just heard from Dennis:
“He was denied.”
Button described that evening’s din-
ner as a “solemn meal.” A few days later,
her boyfriend told her that she had been
acting mean; she had been criticizing
his every move, even his choice of light
bulbs. “What’s going on with you?” he
asked. “Nothing,” she said. “I just feel
weird.” Then she started sobbing. She
almost never cried, and she realized how
much Dennis’s parole rejection, his sec-
ond on the volunteers’ watch, had upset
her. “The double denial is very demor-
alizing,” she said.
In October, she read the transcript
of the parole interview. The lead com-
missioner was Marc Coppola, a former
state senator who had once worked as
a deputy sheriff in Buffalo. He’d started
the interview by reading aloud a de-
tailed description of the crime, and then